Intel announces $8.9 billion investment from US government, which will own 9.9% of chipmaker

 The US government has taken an $8.9 billion, 9.9% stake in Intel (INTC), buying 433.3 million shares in the chipmaker at a price of $20.47 per share.

The government’s investment in Intel will be passive ownership, with no Board representation or other governance or information rights, Intel said in a statement. Intel said the government also agreed to vote with the company's Board of Directors.

Intel said the government's equity stake will be funded by the remaining $5.7 billion in grants previously awarded but not yet paid to Intel under the US CHIPS and Science Act and $3.2 billion awarded to the company as part of the Secure Enclave program.

Intel will continue to deliver on its Secure Enclave obligations and reaffirmed its commitment to delivering trusted and secure semiconductors to the US Department of Defense. The $8.9 billion investment is in addition to the $2.2 billion in CHIPS grants Intel has received to date, making for a total investment of $11.1 billion.

The announcement late Friday comes after President Trump said earlier in the day his administration would take a 10% stake in ailing chip giant Intel. Trump called it a "great deal." Intel's stock closed up 5.5% after the president's announcement.

Intel stock fell 1% in after-hours trading on Friday after details of the deal were confirmed.

"President Trump’s focus on U.S. chip manufacturing is driving historic investments in a vital industry that is integral to the country’s economic and national security," Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in a statement. "We are grateful for the confidence the President and the Administration have placed in Intel, and we look forward to working to advance U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership."

On Tuesday Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that the administration was exploring converting Intel's funding from the Biden-era CHIPS Act into equity aimed at stabilizing the company's US manufacturing business.

Intel is dealing with multiple issues across its businesses. Its manufacturing division is bleeding cash, just as its legacy computer chip segment forfeits market share to rivals Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Qualcomm (QCOM) in the PC space. Intel is also woefully behind AMD and Nvidia (NVDA) in the AI race.

The company's market capitalization of $111 billion is less than half of its value in 2021. And CEO Lip-Bu Tan has been forced to lay off 15% of the company's workforce and shelve plans to build plants in Europe.

But the troubled chipmaker is the only large-scale US-based leading-edge chip manufacturer, giving it geopolitical significance as the nation looks to reshore semiconductor production.

Trump's announcement comes the same week that SoftBank Group announced a $2 billion investment in Intel.

All of this comes as Intel continues to navigate its rocky turnaround plan that began under previous CEO Pat Gelsinger. Current CEO Lip-Bu Tan has scaled back Gelsinger's original vision, canceling construction of international plants and further delaying Intel's $20 billion Ohio chip complex.

ntel is fighting to bring customers into its third-party chip foundry business as it works to scale its newest 18A chip technology. The company has already signed agreements to build chips on its technology with Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN), but Intel is still the foundry business's largest customer.

As part of the deal, Intel said the government will receive a five-year warrant, at $20 per share for an additional five percent of Intel common shares, exercisable only if Intel ceases to own at least 51% of the foundry business.

The company is also contending with losing market share in the server business and client computing business to rival AMD, which also benefits from its own AI business. Intel has effectively been shut out of the AI race due to a lack of innovation compared to AMD (AMD) and Nvidia (NVDA).

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-announces-89-billion-investment-from-us-government-which-will-own-99-of-chipmaker-180452175.html

'New AI Tool Can Target Previously Untreatable Diseases'

 Researchers from Canada and the United States have created an artificial intelligence (AI) tool called PepMLM to target “undruggable” disease proteins. This development could lead to new treatments for previously untreatable cancers, hormonal disorders, Huntington’s disease, and viral infections.

PepMLM uses a natural language processing technique called masked language modeling (MLM) to understand the “language” of proteins. Instead of focusing on a protein’s structure, PepMLM uses information about a protein’s sequencing to develop druglike molecules that can break down proteins with unknown or unstable structures.

“Traditional methods to generate peptides to bind to proteins could take years of work and millions of dollars because we assumed knowing the structure of the target was critical,” study author Ray Truant, PhD, professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, told Medscape Medical News.

Ray Truant, PhD

“What PepMLM demonstrates is that we don’t need to know structure, just sequence, which is in many databases for almost all proteins in every human cell, as well as bacterial and viral proteins,” he said. “This speeds up development time and reduces costs dramatically.”

The study was published online August 13 in Nature Biotechnology.

Developing PepMLM

The multidisciplinary research team has developed numerous models to design peptide-guided protein degraders, which typically relied on existing partner sequences to provide scaffolds for peptide design. Their recent model PepPrCLIP creates new peptides after sampling for peptide candidates and determining target sequence specificity.

As a next step, Truant and colleagues designed PepMLM as a purely de novo, target-sequence-conditioned binder design algorithm, building on the foundations of ESM-2, a protein language model developed by Meta AI. 

By using a masking strategy that puts the peptide binder sequence at the end of the target protein sequences, PepMLM compels ESM-2 to completely reconstruct the entire binding region. During testing, PepMLM matched or improved on validated peptide-protein sequence pairs, outperformed current state-of-the-art models for peptide binder design, and exhibited specific binding to disease-relevant targets.

In initial experiments, the research team found that PepMLM could create strong and specific peptide binders for neural cell adhesion molecule 1, which is a key marker for acute myeloid leukemia, and anti-Müllerian hormone type 2 receptor, which is a critical regulator of polycystic ovarian syndrome.

In further experiments, PepMLM-designed peptides could potentially address Huntington’s disease by degrading disease-related proteins such as MSH3 and the mutant huntingtin protein.

In addition, PepMLM peptides significantly reduced viral phosphoprotein levels from two emerging viruses that the researchers selected for “high pandemic potential” — the Nipah virus and the Hendra virus — as well as the endemic virus human metapneumovirus. The three viruses have few or no vaccines or antiviral treatments.

“The take-home message is that the algorithm can allow any input protein text sequence to generate a binding peptide,” Truant said. “We can target any protein — or tiny part of a protein. It will be a new universal tool for drug development.”

Uncovering Peptide Potential

Molecular geneticists and biomedical scientists have developed numerous algorithms in recent years to identify peptide binding sites and target them for practical application. Researchers at the University of Toronto, for instance, developed PepNN-Struct and PepNN-Seq to predict peptide binding sites based on protein structures or sequences. PepMLM uses training data from PepNN and Propedia.

In 2024, the University of Toronto team also developed a deep-learning model called PepFlow to predict peptide structures, offering another method for better therapeutic delivery.

“Peptides are important biological molecules and are naturally dynamic, so we need to model their different conformations to understand their function,” said Philip M. Kim, PhD, professor of molecular genetics and computer science at the University of Toronto. Kim, who codeveloped PepFlow and the PepNN models, serves as a Canada Research Chair in machine learning in protein and peptide science.

Philip M. Kim, PhD

“Peptides are also important as therapeutics, as can be seen by the glucagon-like peptide-1 analogues, like Ozempic, used to treat diabetes and obesity,” he said.

These deep-learning models still have numerous limitations and room to grow, Kim noted, yet they have exciting potential for future treatments. PepMLM researchers, for instance, have established biotechnology companies to develop more advanced models and use the technology for various applications and diseases. 

“I took note of PepMLM when it came out in a preprint [publication] about two years ago. It’s an interesting approach and can be seen in some ways as complementary to purely structure-based approaches,” Kim said. “A key point currently in biomedical machine learning is whether the best models can generalize or whether they only interpolate from their training data. This is a question here for future investigation (and indeed, also for other peptide design methods), though interpolation itself can also be quite useful.”

The study was funded by grants from Duke University, Cornell University, the CHDI Foundation, the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, the Hartwell Foundation, the Krembil Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. Truant reported no relevant financial relationships. Kim is a cofounder of and consultant to multiple companies, including Fable Therapeutics, TBG Therapeutics, and Zymedi.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/new-ai-tool-can-target-previously-untreatable-diseases-2025a1000ma1

US House Adds CBDC Ban To Massive Defense Policy Bill

 by Jesse Coghlan via CoinTelegraph.com,

The US House added a provision banning the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) into an almost 1,300-page bill setting the country’s defense policy for the 2026 fiscal year.

A revision of HR 3838, the House’s version of a bill implementing the National Defense Authorization Act, was shared on Thursday by the House Rules Committee to include sweeping language banning the Federal Reserve from studying or creating digital currency.

The House passed a similar Republican-backed bill, the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, in July with a slim vote of 219 - 210, which now has an uncertain future in the Senate.

The National Defense Authorization Act and related appropriations bills are seen as “must-pass” national security legislation as they outline how the military will be funded and how it will spend its budget.

It’s typical of lawmakers to add non-defense-related provisions that could otherwise be stalled or heavily revised if passed as standalone bills.

House leaders promised CBDC ban in defense bill

Top House Republicans had promised to include a CBDC ban in the military spending bill in a deal with conservative hardliners in July.

A group of Republican holdouts had refused to move three crypto bills forward unless a CBDC ban was guaranteed to pass, stalling a vote to set up floor debate on the bills for over nine hours, the longest in the House’s history.

At the time, the House passing the CBDC-banning bill on its own was seen as unlikely due to a lack of support. Debate on the bills eventually moved forward after House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said the CBDC ban would be added to the National Defense Authorization Act.

Source: Tom Emmer

Provision would stop Fed-issued digital currency

The provision in the defense policy bill would ban the Fed from issuing any digital currency or asset and stop the central bank from offering financial products or services directly to individuals.

It adds that the central bank may not “test, study, develop, create, or implement” a digital currency or asset, but allows a carve-out for stablecoins, saying the bill does not prohibit “any dollar-denominated currency that is open, permissionless, and private.”

A CBDC bill died last Congress

House Republicans have been looking to ban CBDCs for some time.

The party’s House leaders had looked to pass a version of the CBDC-banning bill in the last congressional session.

A similarly named bill, called the CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act, was introduced by Representative Tom Emmer in early 2023, but it didn’t progress and died with the last Congress.

Emmer reintroduced a version of the bill in the current Congress, and Republicans have backed the effort as aligning with President Donald Trump’s executive order in January prohibiting CBDCs.

https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/us-house-adds-cbdc-ban-massive-defense-policy-bill

RNC Elects Trump-Backed Joe Gruters As Chairman

 by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times,

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has formally chosen its outgoing treasurer, Florida state Sen. Joe Gruters, as its new leader.

He was elected on Aug. 22 at the RNC’s summer meeting in Atlanta.

“The midterms are ahead, where we must expand our current majority in the House and Senate,” Gruters said after his election.

Jennifer Rich was also elected treasurer of the RNC, replacing Gruters.

President Donald Trump, now the dominant influence on national GOP leadership, endorsed the Republican from Sarasota on Truth Social on Aug. 1. He described Gruters as a “MAGA warrior” and someone “who has been with us from the very beginning.”

Gruters co-chaired Trump’s 2016 campaign in the Sunshine State, where he defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after Republican presidential candidates lost there in both 2008 and 2012. His co-chair, Susie Wiles, is now the White House chief of staff.

No one challenged Gruters in his effort to replace outgoing Chairman Michael Whatley, another Trump-backed figure. Whatley was elected in March 2024 alongside Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who served as the RNC’s vice chair through much of 2024.

On July 31, Whatley launched a campaign for the Senate seat currently held by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). That came just a month after Tillis revealed he would retire at the end of his term, a decision he announced after coming out against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.

“He will not let you down,” Whatley said of Gruters.

KC Crosbie, the RNC’s co-chair, praised Whatley’s tenure as RNC leader.

“He has completely transformed this organization. He along with co-chair Trump made everything about winning. ... What happened in 2024? We won,” she said.

The president previously endorsed Gruters in his successful bid to serve as the RNC’s treasurer, a post he assumed in January. In June, Trump appointed Gruters as vice chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

The state senator also chaired the Florida Republican Party from 2019 through 2023, beginning soon after Ron DeSantis was elected governor.

Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis speaks during a rally at the Cheyenne Saloon in Orlando on Nov. 7, 2022. Octavio Jones/Getty Images

During that time, the number of registered Republicans in the state climbed, while the number of registered Democrats declined.

A roughly 225,000-voter advantage for Democrats in 2019 flipped to an almost 780,000-voter edge for Republicans in 2023. That gap has continued to widen since Gruters left the role.

Whatley credited Gruters with leading “the transformation of Florida from a purple state to a red state.”

Trump, DeSantis, and Gruters

Trump also backed Gruters in his efforts to serve as Florida’s chief financial officer. The slot opened up when former CFO Jimmy Patronis entered the special election to fill the seat vacated by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

But Gruters did not win the support of DeSantis, the man ultimately empowered to fill the vacancy in his cabinet—that is, until November 2026, when Florida voters will decide who serves as CFO.

In July, DeSantis appointed then-state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia as CFO. Ingoglia, like Gruters, once led the Florida Republican Party.

When asked why he chose Ingoglia over Gruters, the Florida governor said the latter’s record did not reflect conservative values.

“If George Washington rose from the dead and came back and tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Will you appoint Joe Gruters CFO?’ My response would be no,” he said at a July 16 press conference.

He cited Gruters’s support for Florida’s Amendment 3, which would have legalized recreational marijuana use by adults over 21 years of age.

DeSantis opposed the amendment, which netted a majority of the vote in a 2024 referendum, but fell short of the necessary 60 percent to make it into the state’s constitution.

Earlier this year, DeSantis opposed a Gruters-sponsored immigration bill that he said wasn’t tough enough.

“We don’t have time for weakness,” he said soon after it passed the state Legislature.

Then-Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis and his wife at a Make America Great Again rally in Fort Myers, Fla., on Oct. 31, 2018. Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times

DeSantis ultimately vetoed that bill. Days earlier, however, he signed two other Gruters-sponsored bills that expanded immigration enforcement, created new criminal penalties for some illegal aliens, and cracked down on the issuance of driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

In July, Gruters announced he had hired Trump campaign veterans Chris LaCivita and Tony Fabrizio for his CFO campaign.

Gruters addressed criticisms of his conservatism in his speech after being elected, saying a successful leader would have to bring together competing factions within the party.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/rnc-elects-trump-backed-joe-gruters-chairman

Trump threatens federal intervention in Chicago, government takeover in D.C

 US President Donald Trump on Aug 22 said he would expand his crime crackdown to Chicago, using federal powers to intervene in another city governed by Democrats, and threatened to take full control of Washington, DC, rather than only its policing.

Saying without evidence that violent crime was out of control in the nation’s capital, Mr Trump last week 

deployed National Guard soldiers and federal agents on the streets

 with a mandate to reduce crime.

“It was horrible and Mayor (Muriel) Bowser better get her act straight or she won’t be mayor very long, because we take it over with the federal government, running it like it’s supposed to be run,” Mr Trump told reporters.

Recent statistics, which Mr Trump dismissed, show crime has declined in the US capital since a 2023 peak.

On Chicago, the president said: “When we’re ready, we’ll go in, and we’ll straighten out Chicago.”

Like in Washington, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has said crime including homicides and gun violence has dropped in the last year while New York City - also criticised by Mr Trump - has reported a decline in homicides, burglaries and robberies in the same period.

While the Republican president has cast his efforts as an urgent move to help residents feel safe again, critics and advocates say he aims to assert federal control over cities run by Democratic officials.

Mr Trump’s extraordinary intervention in Washington, including temporarily taking over the city’s police department, is part of a second-term approach that seeks to broaden presidential powers and test any limits.

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/trump-threatens-federal-intervention-in-chicago-government-takeover-in-dc

SanuWave target upped at Roth

 Today, Roth Capital's analyst Kyle Bauser has maintained a 'Buy' rating for SANUWAVE Health (SNWV, Financial) while raising the price target from $54.00 to $55.00.

Here is a brief overview of historical ratings for SANUWAVE Health (SNWV, Financial):

• On July 29, 2025, Roth Capital initiated coverage on SANUWAVE Health (SNWV, Financial), announcing a 'Buy' rating with a target price of $49.00.

SANUWAVE Health Inc is an ultrasound and shock wave technology company using patented systems of noninvasive, high-energy, acoustic shock waves or low-intensity and non-contact ultrasound for regenerative medicine and other applications. The company's focus is regenerative medicine utilizing noninvasive, acoustic shock waves or ultrasound to produce a biological response resulting in the body healing itself through the repair and regeneration of tissue, musculoskeletal, and vascular structures. The company's two primary systems are UltraMIST and PACE. UltraMIST and PACE are the only two Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved directed energy systems for wound healing.

https://www.gurufocus.com/news/3075683/sanuwave-health-snwv-price-target-raised-by-roth-capital-snwv-stock-news

NYU’s Aswath Damodaran: Markets will rally until risks show up in earnings and economy

 Concerns about stock market valuations reaching unsustainable levels have intensified as major indices hit new highs. Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at the NYU School of Business, suggested that markets may be more trustworthy than experts when it comes to predicting future performance.

“For the last 10 years, we’ve had this conversation over and over again,” Damodaran said in an interview with CNBC. “Markets (SP500), (DJI), (COMP:IND) reach a new high. We say, ‘are markets crazy?’ And experts like me come on, and we say, ‘markets are too rich.’”

Damodaran’s perspective challenges the conventional wisdom that has dominated market analysis in recent years. He noted that over the past three to four years, he has come to believe that “markets maybe are more trustworthy on this than experts are, that their markets seem to figure things out.” This represents a significant shift from his previous stance on market valuations.

According to Damodaran, the market has experienced two distinct phases this year. “Through April 8, tech (XLK) especially was beaten up. The Mag 7 (MAGS) collectively lost, I think, $2T in market cap just in that first three months,” he said, highlighting the substantial volatility that has characterized recent market movements.

When asked about the Federal Reserve’s impact on markets, Damodaran expressed skepticism about the significance of rate cuts. “They don’t even affect the one thing they’re supposed to affect, which is interest rates,” he said. “They might affect the Fed funds rate, but treasury rates (US10Y), (US2Y), (US30Y) themselves have a life of their own.”

He predicted that even with Fed rate cuts, treasury bond rates would likely remain above 4% as long as inflation stays around 2.5-2.7%.

Damodaran also attributed recent market movements to a continuously shifting expectations game that “keeps getting reset for this market, and sometimes just delivering what is expected becomes an unexpected plus,” he said.

This pattern explains why markets often react positively to news that merely meets rather than exceeds expectations, creating what Damodaran describes as “a very strange twist on the expectations game.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/nyu-s-aswath-damodaran-markets-will-rally-until-risks-show-up-in-earnings-and-economy/ar-AA1L33MR